NFFO Fights Back against Appeasement

The National Federation of Fishermen’s Organisations, which represents fishermen in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, has launched a blistering attack on UK Fisheries Minister George Eustice, after he made quota concessions to appease nationalist pressure from Scotland during the annual quota negotiations in Brussels.


1500 tonnes of English quota has been taken from the Humberside based Fish Producers Organisation and promised to Scotland without consultation or notice. Also, George Eustice is “consulting” on a revised concordat between the devolved administrations. If implemented, the concordat would mean the transfer of almost the entire English North Sea whitefish fleet into Scottish administration, along with its licences and quota allocations. The NFFO regards as a bogus consultation because the Scottish minister has already announced that the concordat will be implemented as written.

The NFFO statement says, “All this is being done behind closed doors, in secret. English fishing interests are being systematically traded away to appease the clamour from Scotland. It stinks.

“This is all about high politics – the Westminster government is desperate to avoid creating conditions that would favour a second referendum in Scotland. And the nationalist government is determined to create defacto independence where it can, and also to wring concession after concession out of a government preoccupied with delivering Brexit.”

“The UK overall, will lose out as a result of this quota grab because the only European countries licensed to fish in the North East Arctic apart from England, are French, German, Portuguese and Spanish. That cod will be landed, processed and consumed in those countries with value added all along the supply chain. Apart from being opportunist, and unprincipled, this transfer makes no economic sense. The Scots would swap it away for lower value species that they catch.”

“This ministerial decision has been presented as a way of dealing with chokes* that will result from implementation of the landings obligation in 2017 but it has not escaped our notice that no Scottish quota is being tagged for this purpose – only English.”

“Devolved administrations have their individual ministers to speak up for them but the English industry has no such champion. How else can you explain this policy of appeasement? Our minister needs to find the word “no” in his vocabulary. “

The NFFO statement added: “We have as much to fear from an aggressive nationalist agenda in Scotland and our own supine minister, as we have to gain from a successful Brexit.”

The statement concludes: “Scotland’s continual demand is to sit at the table during international negotiations, when this is plainly a reserved responsibility. This shows the level of ambition that there is in Edinburgh but there is no push-back from our own minister. The opposite in fact. We can get no assurances even on this clear-cut matter.”

“Scottish ministers make much of the tonnage of fish landed into Scotland. But there are more UK fishermen’s livelihoods at stake outside Scotland than in, and a significant proportion of those landings are made by English vessels landing into Peterhead. Politically, fishing carries more weight in Scotland. We are being sacrificed as part of a wider game but we will not go down without a fight.”

NFFO 19th December 2016

Note: A choke is when one quota in a mixed fishery is exhausted, meaning that the vessel has to tie up for the rest of the year. It is a problem faced when a discard ban is applied to a quota system in mixed fisheries.

Managing fish stocks - Discarding and the landing obligation

Landing obligation - and ban on discards of catches that it entails - is one of the key elements resulting from the reform of the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP). The Commission proposal paves way for a speedy implementation of the ban on discards. The PECH Committee will present the draft report on landing obligation at the next committee meeting on 16 October.

The film explains what discards are and describes different ways of improving selectivity, based on two langoustine fisheries, one in the Bay of Biscay (Brittany, France) and the other in Skagerrak (Gotland, Sweden). It also reveals the most important measures proposed by the European Commission to reduce by-catches and discards.

Discarding is the practice of returning unwanted catches to the sea, either dead or alive, either because they are too small, the fisherman has no quota, or because of certain catch composition rules. The new CFP does away with the wasteful practice of discarding through the introduction of a landing obligation. This change in regime serves as a driver for more selectivity, and provides more reliable catch data. 

To allow fishermen to adapt to the change, the landing obligation will be introduced gradually, between 2015 and 2019 for all commercial fisheries (species under TACs, or under minimum sizes) in European waters. Under the landing obligation all catches have to be kept on board, landed and counted against the quotas. Undersized fish cannot be marketed for human consumption purposes. The landing obligation will be applied fishery by fishery. 

Details of the implementation will be included in multiannual plans or in specific discard plans when no multiannual plan is in place. These details include the species covered, provisions on catch documentation, minimum conservation reference sizes, and exemptions (for fish that may survive after returning them to the sea, and a specific de minimis discard allowance under certain conditions). Quota management will also become more flexible in its application to facilitate the landing obligation.

TtGaps comment:

In the UK the most concerned fishermen are those that operate in what are referred to as 'mixed fisheries' - typically bottom or demersal trawling - where the boat is fishing for a broad range of fish that inhabit the sea bed and not just targeting a single species as many pelagic trawlers or netters might. In a mixed fishery the spectre of 'choke species' looms large - where are single species of fish for which there is a small or non-existent quota is being caught which then prevents the boat from fishing in that area. At certain times of the year and in many areas this will be a constant problem for many vessels - and, as yet, an answer to the problem has yet to be found!

There are many references to be found on the web relating to this thorny subject:

http://www.fishermensvoice.com/archives/0311GroundfishermenFaceEconomicDisaster.html  

http://en.fvm.dk/fileadmin/user_upload/ENGLISH_FVM.DK/Themes/Yield_of_fish/Calculating_effects_of_choked_species.pdf 

http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100602/full/465540a.html 

https://www.linkedin.com/groups/ON-CHOKE-SPECIES-3971738.S.106903949 

http://www.clientearth.org/reports/simply-mixed-fisheries.pdf 

Client Earth Paper 

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/faf.12079/abstract